


The Coming Storm

by Harvey_King



Category: Lackadaisy
Genre: Community: picfor1000, Epilepsy, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Inspired by Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 16:09:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10517205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harvey_King/pseuds/Harvey_King
Summary: The pressure sets in when the barometer drops.Written for the 15thA Picture Is Worth a Thousand Wordschallenge, inspired byAloneby Scott Hutchinson.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also available [on Livejournal](http://picfor1000.livejournal.com/264317.html).

The pressure sets in when the barometer drops. It builds slowly behind his sphenoid bone, inevitably making him remove his spectacles and rub his eyes. From there, it imposes upon his inner ears and gorge, pushing down until he’s hot with nausea and wary of sudden movements.

“Poor pookums,” Mitzi May declares, leaning over him to lay a cold cloth on his forehead.

“I’b fine.” He presses his handkerchief to his nose with both hands.

“Sure you are, sweetie,” she says. “You just got over-excited with all those numbers.”

Mordecai clenches his teeth against another lurch of vertigo and wishes he were dead. The dark room into which he was forcibly steered is the size of his childhood apartment and seemingly serves no purpose save to house a set of furniture worth more than his life. Lying supine may be inadvisable, but the alternative is to risk bleeding on the chaise longue or the silk rug. Bad enough, _unthinkable_ enough, that he’s already dripped blood onto his borrowed tie. 

“I say—”

The whiplash turn of his head to the doorway threatens to split his skull.

“—what has our boy done to himself now?” 

Mr. May stands in the hall, looking in, his overcoat draped over his arm and hat in hand. The light is behind him and his expression is unfathomable. There is something very wrong with that light. It’s wet and blurry, almost pearlescent, like the subtle glow of Mrs. May’s necklace.

“He’s not feeling so good, dear.” Her voice is higher than it was only a moment before, a birdlike chirp that does nothing favorable for Mordecai’s headache.

The room draws in as Mr. May enters, his footsteps soft on the silk rug. Mordecai watches, silent and unblinking: Mr. May looking at his wife, Mrs. May looking at the blood on Mordecai’s tie. The pressure in his head increases as Mr. May strokes his wife’s hair and smiles benevolently down at him. 

He tastes copper in the back of his mouth and knows with sudden certainty that a storm is poised to break.

/

If Mordecai were the poetic type, he might imagine dark clouds swelling up inside his skull to match the upthrust cumulonimbi looming over the godforsaken countryside between Defiance and St. Louis. But he isn’t. 

_Take_.

The order is implicit as Viktor wags a handkerchief in front of him. Mordecai recoils at the black smear of engine grease and who knows what else on the filthy rag. He pulls out his pocket square instead and dabs at his nose. Even this small motion takes more effort than it should. The country roads are to blame. And Viktor’s driving. He feels as if he’s been beaten with a sack of oranges. 

Despite the situation obviously being addressed, Viktor continues to peer at him.

“It’s only a nosebleed,” Mordecai says. “There was no need to pull over.”

Viktor shakes his head. “You had fit.”

“I most certainly did not.” His attempted sniff of contempt backfires and he is forced to discreetly expel a mouthful of watery pink expectoration into his pocket square.

“Not, eh...” Here Viktor pauses the way he does when the English isn’t coming to him and he knows the futility of trying his native tongue, even though at this point it should be obvious that Mordecai is much more capable of learning Slovakian than Viktor is of improving his English. He eventually makes a flopping gesture with his hand. “Not like that. Like this.” He stares ahead.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Viktor looks at him for a moment longer, then shrugs and makes an annoyingly Slavic sound in his throat that is somehow more provocative than an outright argument. It is several highly dissatisfying minutes before he consents to starting the truck again. His disgusting handkerchief sits on the seat between them for the remainder of the drive back.

/

In 1920, Mordecai watched as the greater part of a .22 slug was removed from his sinus cavity. The headaches are predictable and their cause is known to him. He sees no reason to throw away money consulting with a doctor. 

“Big storm coming,” Serafine Savoy declares, sprawled on the couch in her hotel suite. 

Mordecai sits stiffly in the chair opposite her as he waits for her brother to finish his morning ablutions at seven o’clock at night. “Are you adding ‘weather witch’ to your curriculum vitae?”

Serafine bares her teeth in a smile. “Maybe Agau told me. Maybe he come whisper it in my ear when you turned up.”

He refuses to give her the satisfaction of asking who Agau is. The summer air is oppressively humid, and while the city is prone to unannounced thunderstorms this time of year, there is hardly a cloud in the evening sky. He suspects she may be attempting humor. 

Unfortunately, she takes his silence as consent to continue. “Agau, you know he bring the storms. He make the sky catch fire and the earth shake.”

“That isn’t how meteorology works. Or geology, for that matter. You do understand that, yes?”

She laughs, a low and throaty sound. “When he come to visit, when he grab himself a body to ride, he make those mounts sputter and shake. You know what they say when he riding them?”

“I can’t possibly imagine.”

Nico slinks out of the bedroom, still buttoning his vest. He flashes a sleepy-eyed smile at Mordecai. “They say ‘I am the gunner of god.’”

He and his sister look to Mordecai’s holster under his jacket and then exchange a look of what he can only surmise is sly amusement. 

“Ha, ha,” he says obligingly. “Yes, very funny.”

Serafine rises to her feet. “They don’t usually survive, them that Agau rides. Mais, not for long.”

Mordecai sighs. “What would I do without your charming swamp fables?” 

He follows the Savoys out of the hotel and into their night’s work, pausing only to take off his spectacles for a moment and absently rub his eyes.


End file.
